Biography

William Styron was born in Newport News, Virginia, on June 11, 1925, the son of William Clark and Pauline Styron. Styron’s roots in the South are deep and can be traced back to the seventeenth century. He grew up steeped in stories of the Civil War and of its battlefields. Raised in Hilton Village, a semirural community several miles from Newport News, he went to segregated schools and lived in a family with black servants. His father worked in shipbuilding in Newport News. His mother, who developed cancer soon after his birth, remained an invalid for eleven years, dying in 1939, after Styron’s sophomore year at Morrison High School.

Around that time, he published his first story (now lost) in the school newspaper. Styron was an active student—he was president of his sophomore class and manager of the football team—but his teachers thought he lacked discipline, and he was sent to the Christchurch School, an Episcopal preparatory school near Urbana, Virginia. In this small school of fifty students, he enjoyed the atmosphere of an encouraging extended family. He wrote for the school newspaper and yearbook, sailed, and played basketball. Although he attended chapel every day and church on Sunday, he also took up drinking, one of the traditional activities of a Virginia gentleman.

In 1942, Styron entered Davidson College, a Presbyterian institution near Charlotte, North Carolina. His father thought that the University of Virginia, known for its rowdy drinking parties, would be inappropriate for his son, an indifferent student.

Styron joined the college newspaper and literary magazine, and he rid himself of his Tidewater accent after fellow students made fun of it. At eighteen, Styron joined the Navy, expecting to train as an officer, but he was transferred to Duke University. There, he attended classes but was still under military discipline. Duke was a traditional campus, strict about matters of dress, with coeds wearing white gloves on off-campus dates.

Again Styron proved a mediocre student, and he was put on active duty by the end of 1944. After boot camp, Styron performed various duties and spent a few months guarding a prison camp. The dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan spared him the experience of World War II combat, and he returned to the postwar liberated atmosphere of the Duke campus in 1946. In this invigorating environment, he began to develop as a writer of fiction, winning praise from teachers and publishing several stories in the college magazine while also attending writers’ conferences.

In 1947, Styron moved to New York, securing a job as an editor at McGraw-Hill, where he read reams of unsolicited manuscripts. As lax an employee as he had been a student, Styron was fired after six months. He provides a vivid portrait of himself as an aspiring writer in the character of Stingo in his novel Sophie’s Choice (1979). Having taken a writing class at the New School for Social Research taught by Hiram Haydn, a book editor in New York, Styron began to conceive his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951). Almost always a slow writer subject to writer’s block, Styron moved back to Durham for a brief period before finishing the novel in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and in Valley Cottage, near Nyack, New York. In 1951, Styron was recalled to active duty in the Marines during the Korean War, and the episode became the basis of his fine novella The Long March (1956). His first novel had been hailed by critics, who saw him as the successor to the great southern novelist William Faulkner. About this time, he also met his future wife, Rose Burgender, and traveled in Europe. He worked on a novella he never completed (about his experiences as a prison guard) and on a novel set in Europe that was eventually published as Set This House on Fire (1960).

In 1953, Styron moved to Roxbury, Connecticut. He married Rose Burgender, with whom he had two daughters, Susanna (born in 1955) and Paolo (born in 1958). Active as a reviewer and a superb writer of nonfiction, Styron began work in 1962 on his most controversial novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), which dared to present a slave’s experience not only in his own words but also within his consciousness. In spite of fierce attacks, mainly by African American writers, the novel enjoyed enormous critical and popular success, winning Styron the Pulitzer Prize in 1968.

Styron did not publish another novel until Sophie’s Choice, in which he extended his study of human oppression to the Holocaust—another daring feat of the imagination that again brought him accolades and criticism. He also continued to work on a novel based on his experience in the Marines.

Despite his success, Styron suffered a long, desperate session of depression in 1985. An account of this episode was published by Vanity Fair in 1989 as an extended essay. Both Vanity Fair and Styron received great volumes of mail from grateful readers suffering from depression. In 1990, Random House published Styron’s extended essay in a book titled Darkness Visible; it won critical praise and became a best seller.

Analysis

Styron is a master of modern literary style. He has been compared to Faulkner because, more than any of his contemporaries, Styron has a feeling for rhythms of language that seem to embody the speech of a whole region, a lush, romantic feeling for nature and for human relationships. Styron is a painstaking writer, often spending a day perfecting a single page. Yet his prose flows so gracefully that his enormous effort usually remains invisible. This is especially true of Lie Down in Darkness and The Confessions of Nat Turner, both of which appear to be seamless narratives, stories that unfold without a break or flaw in style. If there is a fault in Styron’s style, some critics would say it is his perfectionism. He has been criticized for exercising too much control over his narratives, producing novels that are too meticulous, too polished. This kind of exquisite technique robs his work of a certain rough-edged life, an unruliness that should overtake the writer and ride him, so to speak. Styron’s sense of language, in other words, is too precious; it can actually get in the way of the life he is trying to portray.

This tendency is perhaps most evident in The Confessions of Nat Turner, in which Turner’s consciousness is transparently Styron’s—that is, Turner is endowed with Styron’s gift for language and much of Styron’s literary sensibility. Some critics, however, have argued that this is precisely Styron’s achievement: endowing characters such as Turner with an integrity and articulateness that is the equal of their author’s. From this point of view, Styron’s gorgeous vocabulary ennobles his characters and allows them to speak on a higher literary level that is the only way to reveal their full humanity and complexity. There is certainly ample precedent for Styron’s sophisticated technique in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), in which the interior monologues use a highly elevated and baroque language to register not merely what the characters are thinking but also what they are as human beings.

Styron is also an excellent observer of social manners. In both his fiction and nonfiction, he is a shrewd reporter, rendering not only the facts of life also but how those facts are received by the senses and turned into feelings. He is a great poet of consciousness who bases his flights of rhetoric on a realistic notation of the data of life.

One of the great themes of Styron’s fiction is life in the American South. Lie Down in Darkness surveys the modern South by focusing on the life and death of Peyton Loftis, a young woman growing up in a region still recovering from the devastation of the Civil War—psychologically more than physically.

The novel suggests that World War I and the lost generation—those young Americans whose lives were interrupted by war, some of whom stayed in Europe—proved to be a crisis for those who stayed home as well, such as Peyton’s father, Milton, whose lack of purpose and hollow life as a southern gentleman deprive Peyton of basic beliefs, a foundation for her future. She tells her father, in fact, that it is her generation that is lost.

The Confessions of Nat Turner, on the other hand, is Styron’s self-confessed attempt to imagine what it must have been like for a slave in Virginia to revolt against his masters. As a descendant of a slaveowning class and as the product of a segregated society, Styron wrote a novel that aimed not only to understand the past but also to effect a kind of reconciliation between the races in the present. His treatment of Nat Turner as a brilliant man, a kind of genius with a gift for language equal to Styron’s own, has been perceived by many critics, though by no means all, as a brilliant effort to bridge the gap between past and present. As the African American writer James Baldwin said of the novel, “He has begun the common history—ours.”

Sophie’s Choice represents a continuation of the themes of The Confessions of Nat Turner. The narrator, Stingo, is a white southerner trying to come to terms with Sophie, a survivor of the Holocaust. The novel contains passages on southern and European history, positing a historical identity that is not meant to minimize the differences between cultures but to reveal the overarching experiences, from slavery to the Holocaust, that have shaped the modern world. Many of Styron’s stories have been about survival and suicide. In writing a book about his own suicidal depression, Darkness Visible (1990), Styron admits that he did not realize how much these themes formed a pattern in his work, or how drinking has often been a part of this pattern, as it is in the behavior of Milton Loftis, a lawyer with a romantic, literary sensibility similar to Styron’s own.

Drinking immobilizes Loftis. It eases the pain of his lack of action and the harsh criticisms of his puritanical wife, and it becomes a way to negotiate the boring routines of daily existence. Loftis sees flaws in himself and in his family, but he is fatally blind to what his own daughter needs, because of his adoring, even incestuous, longing for her. Drink becomes the only lubricant that keeps him going.

Though Styron has survived and become much more successful than his characters, there is a brooding, depressive sense of existence in his prose, a sense that seems related to his own titanic writer’s blocks and his inability to complete work.

He has begun and abandoned several novels. In This Quiet Dust, and Other Writings (1982) and in Darkness Visible, Styron has proven himself a writer of superb nonfiction prose. In both the essay form and the memoir, his precise command of language and his candor make for compelling reading.

Perhaps the best example of this is “This Quiet Dust,” an account of his trip to survey the site of Nat Turner’s rebellion. The essay provides a striking counterpoint to the novel, for the essay reveals not the mind of the slave but the mind of the writer approaching his material, wondering how he can recapture the past and do justice to a figure who has troubled and excited him for more than twenty years.

Lie Down in Darkness made Styron’s reputation as a novelist. It was a brilliant first novel that showcased a writer in full control of his language, which fit into a perfectly shaped story, beginning on the day Peyton Loftis’s body is being returned to her Virginia home. Styron describes the scene, the funeral cortege, and the characters—Peyton’s father, Milton, her mother, Helen, and Milton’s mistress, Dolly Bonner—who will dominate the story. It is a long day of mourning, yet Styron manages to break up the day with poignant flashbacks that gradually explain the events that led to Peyton’s suicide.

Milton is inconsolable over the loss of his daughter. His one hope is that his estranged wife, Helen, will come back to him and repair their relationship, which he now believes is all that he has left in life. Helen does not even want to attend the funeral, let alone readmit Milton into her life.

Through a series of flashbacks, it is revealed that Milton had always doted on his daughter and resented his wife’s harsh criticism of his drinking and that Helen has been jealous of Peyton and rejected her in favor of her ailing daughter, Maudie.

Nothing Peyton does seems right in Helen’s eyes. When Peyton accidentally drops Maudie, Helen accuses her of doing it deliberately. When a teenage Peyton is given a drink at a party by her father, Helen treats Peyton like a slut and excoriates Milton for turning his daughter into an alcoholic like himself. Although Helen is overly severe, she is largely right about Milton’s behavior. Her unbending personality, however, is entirely devoid of humanity.

The novel’s climax arrives in a flashback relating the catastrophe of Peyton’s wedding. She has been away from home for years, refusing to see her mother, but she is coaxed home by her father. He has stopped drinking and become reconciled with Helen, a development that has come about partly as a result of Maudie’s death. The patterns of Peyton’s childhood reassert themselves at the wedding—only this time, it is Peyton encouraging her father to drink. She hurts him terribly when she confesses that she thinks he is a jerk and that she has come home only to play a role that will please her parents. She is being honest but very cruel. She has become a rather hopeless figure. She tells her father that she is a part of a lost generation because his generation has provided no substantial legacy, no repository of values that might guide her in a new, uncertain world.

In many ways, the characters of this novel are unpleasant and irredeemable. Yet they do struggle to right themselves, and Styron’s deft use of flashbacks, in which the reader’s knowledge of the characters increases incrementally, is riveting.

When The Confessions of Nat Turner first appeared, it was acclaimed as breakthrough both in fiction and in race relations. A white southerner, steeped in the history of his region, had boldly entered the mind of a black slave, according him the dignity of an articulate voice and making him into a modern hero. Certainly, Styron’s Turner is cruel in his taking of close to sixty lives, but he is nevertheless the poet of the aspirations of a people. Early reviews lauded the language and the sympathy with which Styron presented the story.

Soon, though, a group of African American writers attacked the book, accusing Styron of distorting history, of co-opting their hero, and of demeaning Turner by endowing him with love for one of his victims, a young white woman. These critics saw Styron as usurping their history, much as white people had usurped the labor and the very lives of their ancestors. They rejected the notion that a white southerner—or any white person, for that matter—could fathom the mind of a slave.

Styron defended himself admirably, for he had made a close reading of the historical record and knew exactly where he was taking liberties with history, and he was supported by several historians. Less defensible, or at least problematic, was his decision to endow Turner with a contemporary imagination.

Turner does speak in the accents of nineteenth century Virginia; he thinks very much like Styron. Yet even this seeming defect in the novel may be its major strength. Styron’s point is that Turner was, in many ways, ahead of his time: This self-taught slave probably had the mind of a genius, and it would be condescending to express his thoughts in language less sophisticated than the writer’s own.

Quite aside from this controversy, The Confessions of Nat Turner can be read as a tragic love story, of a Nat Turner who learns much from white people even as they oppress him. Styron shows that tenderness was possible between the races even under the regime of slavery—a fact the historian Eugene Genovese has corroborated in his research. By thinking of Turner as his equal, Styron was able to remove the clichés from the presentation of race in fiction. That he touched a nerve in his critics, who strongly attacked him, suggests something of the power of that love story and how it might pose a threat to those who doubt the races can reconcile.

Sophie’s Choice is Styron’s most ambitious novel. It contains the major themes of his previous fiction, embodying his loves of the South and of literature, his experience of war, and his quest to write a major novel summing up the significant issues of his age.

His narrator, Stingo, is a callow youth who is living in Brooklyn, as Styron did, trying to write fiction. Stingo’s sexual experience has been limited, and he finds himself attracted to a beautiful Polish woman, Sophie, a survivor of a concentration camp.

It is 1947, and the incredible suffering of the Holocaust is just beginning to be revealed and understood. The situation becomes complicated for Stingo, who becomes the third member of a triangle when he befriends Sophie’s lover, Nathan, who is erratic and paranoic but also charismatic. Nathan flouts propriety, and his radical individualism appeals to the young Stingo, who—again, like Styron—has fared poorly in the bureaucratic publishing world and who is looking for a way to express himself.

Sophie’s behavior is puzzling to Stingo; she is passive and willing to let Nathan abuse her. Nathan’s cruelty is eventually explained in terms of his drug addiction and mental illness. Similarly, Sophie’s willingness to be treated as a victim begins to make sense when Stingo learns of her concentration camp experience—the way she had to make herself available sexually to her captors, and to make her awful choice: surrendering one of her children to the gas ovens.

Sophie is not Jewish. In fact, her father wrote anti-Semitic tracts. Being Polish was enough to send her to the camps. Styron’s point is an important one: Millions of non-Jews died in the camps, and the fate of Jew and non-Jew alike is a human tragedy that involves everyone. Styron’s decision to have Stingo narrate the story allows him to deal with the Holocaust sensitively and tactfully. His young alter ego is able to learn gradually about these horrifying events, so that they become a dramatic and believable part of the novel. Yet the narrator alone does not suffice.

Styron also includes a narrator who provides essay like excursions into the history of the Holocaust—a daring and perhaps not always successful addition to the novel.

Sophie’s Choice is Styron’s darkest vision of the modern world. Sophie and Nathan eventually commit suicide. Her burden of guilt is too great for her to endure life after the war, and Nathan seems to have chosen her for a lover to fulfill his own self-destructive course. What redeems their lives, in a sense, is Stingo’s devotion to them, his passion to understand what happened to them and what it means for him. By implication, their story becomes the writer’s story, an account of why he writes, and why others should care for lives that end in failure.

It was in Paris in October, 1985, that Styron first realized his continuing struggle to regain his mental equilibrium might lead to his death. He had been fighting against a growing loss of self-esteem for some months over the previous summer, and during that October trip to receive the Prix Mondial Cino del Duca, which should have been a joyful occasion, his feelings of worthlessness deepened.

He had at first ascribed his anxiety and restlessness to alcohol withdrawal, for he had abruptly given up whiskey and all other intoxicants the previous June. As his moods worsened, he started to read as much as he could on the disease of depression, about which little was known at that time. When his distress intensified before he had left for the Paris trip with his wife, Rose, he had made an appointment to see a psychiatrist as soon as he returned to his home in Connecticut.

As he meditates on his own wretched mental state, Styron is reminded of the death of the existentialist writer Albert Camus and the prominence of suicide and despondency in his work. This segues into a long discussion of the suicides of the activist Abbie Hoffman and writer Primo Levi and the suspected suicide of poet Randall Jarrell. Although depression afflicts an eclectic group and anyone might be a potential victim, there is some evidence to suggest that artistic types, especially poets, are unusually prone to the disease.

After returning home from Paris, Styron met with his doctor “Gold,” who treated him with platitudes and large doses of drugs. He became increasingly obsessed with his own death and considered many possible methods of suicide. He disguised and then disposed of a private manuscript, rewrote his will, and attempted to write a letter of farewell but found it too difficult. Late one night, knowing he could not get through another day, he listened to the Brahms Alto Rhapsody, whose beauty opened his heart to all the joys that he had known in his home. The next day, he admitted himself to the hospital, in spite of the fact that his doctor had not advised it. He found the hospital a benign and stabilizing place compared to his home, with its numerous random associations, and within a few days his fantasies of self-destruction all but disappeared. Styron spent seven weeks in the hospital, and he handles his experience with such dexterity that he manages to find humor in the classes offered there, such as art therapy.

More than once, he emphasizes that the disease usually runs its course, and recovery is usually possible. In his own case, he believes that the real healers were seclusion and time. This short book ends with Styron’s analysis of the possible root causes of his own depression and a lovely literary illusion to Dante’s Inferno.

The memoir is marked by painful honesty and a remarkable lack of self-pity, considering the acute suffering that it recounts.

Summary

Styron is the poet of human failure: Peyton Loftis kills herself, Nat Turner engages in a suicidal slave revolt, and Sophie and Nathan die in a suicide pact. In spite of these depressing stories, the author’s style is uplifting, a beautiful evocation of human beings and settings. Although he himself has been subject to despair, his novels prevail in their sheer artistry. In their graceful language, they suggest that human beings are capable of grace, of a forgiveness beyond guilt. In Styron’s novels, there is always the opportunity to communicate and to reconcile human conflicts, even if most such conflicts end badly.

Bibliography

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